Interracial marriage in the United States has been legal in all U. states since the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v.

Virginia that deemed "anti-miscegenation" laws unconstitutional. The proportion of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since, such that 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were interracial marriages by 2010 compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid 20th century.

Using the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (Cycle VI), the likelihood of divorce for interracial couples to that of same-race couples was compared.

Comparisons across marriage cohorts revealed that, overall, interracial couples have higher rates of divorce, particularly for those that married during the late 1980s.

In contrast, 20.1% of white women married a black man, while just 9.4% married an Asian man.

The numbers are the relative rates at which interracial couples get divorced i.e.Likewise, since Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, Hispanic marriages with non-Hispanics are not registered as interracial if both partners are of the same race (i.e.a Black Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic Black partner).The study also observed a clear gender divide in racial preference with regards to marriage: Women of all the races which were studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race for marriage, with the caveat that East Asian women only discriminated against Black and Hispanic men, and not against White men.Several studies have found that a factor which significantly affects an individual's choices with regards to marriage is socio-economic status ("SES")—the measure of a person's income, education, social class, profession, etc.In 2006, 88% of foreign-born White Hispanic males were married to White Hispanic females.In terms of out-marriage, Hispanic males who identified as White had non-Hispanic wives more often than other Hispanic men.Virginia, but also continues to represent an absolute minority among the total number of wed couples.According to the United States Census Bureau, the number of interracially married couples has increased from 310,000 in 1970 to 651,000 in 1980, to 964,000 in 1990, to 1,464,000 in 2000 and to 2,340,000 in 2008; accounting for 0.7%, 1.3%, 1.8%, 2.6% and 3.9% of the total number of married couples in those years, respectively.For example, a study by the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University confirmed that women show a tendency to marry up in socio-economic status; this reduces the probability of marriage of low SES men.Research at the universities of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Texas A&M addressing the topic of socio-economic status, among other factors, showed that none of the socio-economic status variables appeared to be positively related to outmarriage within the Asian American community, and found lower-socioeconomically stable Asians sometimes utilized outmarriage to whites as a means to advance social status.